1. Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of electronics, and more particularly, to a large-area parking-monitoring system, e.g. a city-wide parking-monitoring system.
2. Prior Arts
Locating a vacant parking space causes much frustration to motorists. It increases fuel consumption and has a negative impact to the environment. To conserve energy resources and enhance the quality of the environment, it is highly desired to develop a parking-monitoring system, which can transmit substantially real-time parking occupancy data to motorists. Based on the parking occupancy data, a motorist can be guided towards a vacant parking space at destination.
Prior arts disclose many parking-monitoring systems. These systems are suitable for a relatively small parking area, e.g. a parking lot or few city blocks. U.S. Pat. No. 6,285,297 issued to Ball on Sep. 4, 2001 discloses a parking-monitoring system. It comprises multiple cameras at different locations and a central image-processor. Each camera scans a portion of the parking area. The images acquired by these cameras are transmitted to the central image-processor and processed to generate parking occupancy data. Constrained by the high cabling cost, this system can only monitor a small parking area.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,492,283 issued to Racunas, jr. on Feb. 17, 2009 discloses another parking-monitoring system. It comprises an internet-accessible web server storing parking occupancy data and a plurality of detectors collecting the real-time parking occupancy data. Each detector communicates with the web server through a wireless local-area network (WiFi) connection. Because WiFi has a medium range (<100 m), this system can only monitor a small parking area.
The parking-monitoring systems disclosed in prior arts are suitable for a relatively small parking area, but not for a city spanning a few square kilometers. To monitor parking city-wide, the present invention discloses a large-area parking-monitoring system.